The Power of Positive Rewards

When you attend a 5-Day TapRooT® Advanced Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Training, you learn about enforcement, changing behavior, and creating the workplace culture we all envision we could have. Through discussions around behavior, we talk about how moving from infrequent, uncertain, negative rewards to soon, certain, negative rewards may quickly change behavior.

However, soon, certain, negative rewards result in reluctant compliance from workers. No one will be happy with this change but will be forced to comply to avoid negative reinforcement. This reluctant compliance over time will turn into the norm of working in a strictly run workplace. Once the compliance is the norm and deviation is the oddity we can then transition to the next critical step… moving on to the use of soon, certain, positive rewards to create a long-term positive environment.

Within this soon, certain, positive phase there is the discussion of using rewards in place of discipline (the negative) to enforce the correct behaviors. So what is a reward? According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a reward is the following:

“to give money or another kind of payment to (someone or some,hing) for
something good that has been done”

So by that definition, we can look at the following rewards:

• money or financial incentive (cash)
• a gift or recognition (coffee mug, pizza for lunch)

When I look at the list above, I think of a simpler reward that can be provided in the workplace, one simple phrase: “Great job! Thank you!” This kind of recognition if used genuinely can be one of the greatest forms of behavioral modification, both for the thank-er and for the thank-ee. Both benefit from the recognition of a job well done and the simple note that someone truly has seen and recognizes that, and even more importantly appreciates it.